09:30 pmHaving discovered that Barbara Vine is Ruth Rendell, you'd think I'd drop Vine's book at once. But Asta's Book wasn't as psychologically screwy as Rendell's psychological thrillers (which always fail to convince me of their likelihood. But then, so do Iris Murdoch's characters fail to convince. Maybe there's a cultural thing happening here and a peculiarly English form of Awfulness that doesn't happen over here.) In fact it was fairly benign, but- either Vine's talent or the fuzziness of heat- it did drag me off to another place for a day or two, and not one I especially wanted to be in. That too is a function of hot weather reading: either it's impossible, a miserable slog though page after unending page, or it socks you over the back of the head and drags you to Elsewhere for a spell; and when you come back the world looks weird indeed. This is one reason why I've never revisited those two hot weather horrors par excellence, Gormenghast and Terra Nostra. Will read the latter some day, preferably in a polar vortex winter.

Then I finally finished Shadow of Night which hurrah! will count towards my Shakespeare reading challenge since Shakespeare does appear, at last, on p.575 of a 577 page novel.

Comments:

A friend pointed me at Cindy Pon, but a read of one of her earlier titles doesn't bode well, too Mary Sue and too summary fairy tale-ish, though very Taiwanese-Chinese. I'm going to try a later title and see if it has improved.